I was a child of ten or eleven when, at the British Council Library, I stumbled upon a series of books called ​‘Swallows and Amazons’ by Arthur Ransome. To be totally honest, I picked the first of these books up because of the cover: an attractive sketch of a large lake below an immense sky, with small sailboats scudding through the water.

The series follows a group of children in the early-to-mid 20^th century, in England’s Lake District. Their families own two rickety sailboats, and in these they explore their region’s biggest lake, slipping into coves and inlets, tacking up and down the water in impromptu races, and camping on islets through their summer holidays.

It was an idyllic – and very English – vision of childhood, and I was hooked. Until then, I had never thought of myself as a kid drawn to the great outdoors, and truthfully speaking, I am still not a person so drawn. But there was, in Ransome’s depiction of his little world, so much adventure, beauty, independence, and discovery. Also, so much loving attention paid to the natural world, to how water moved under wind, to trees and mud and birds and worms. In one book, the children decide they want to pan for gold and purify it themselves, which leads to an elaborate description of making charcoal from scratch; in another, they set up a system of pigeon post, using passenger pigeons to carry messages around the lake.

Since my own childhood, all our lives have been sundered even more from the natural world. Which means there’s every reason to read Ransome today: to remind ourselves of the wonder and pleasure that nature holds, if only to recognise what we’re on the cusp of losing.